Since 2013 HCC has maintained 3 main clusters: Sandhills and Tusker, which are AMD systems, and Crane, which uses Intel processors. Due to data center space and cooling limitations, Tusker will be moved to a new home at WSEC this fall to make space for an upcoming purchase this spring. Before that, however, Sandhills will be retired as a separate AMD-based resource, and portions of it will be combined with Tusker resulting in a singular unified resource. The specific date for the move is yet to be determined and will occur no sooner than October 1st. This decision is motivated by a both a need to create space for the planned purchase of new hardware this coming spring semester and the fact that Tusker and Sandhills are both out of warranty hardware that is aging considerably.
Over the last 6 years, Sandhills and Tusker have provided over 500M cpu hours to HCC researchers and continue to be heavily used resources. However, a majority of jobs submitted to Sandhills (98%) and Tusker (99%) in 2018 were single node jobs. This indicates that these jobs would be well suited to run on Crane during the migration.
During this move, all data currently stored on the $WORK filesystems on both Sandhills and Tusker will be removed. Users with data in these locations are strongly encouraged to move their files as soon as possible to prevent data loss. The new $COMMON file system may be well suited for this, as it is available across all of the clusters and is not subject to the 6 month purge policy in effect on $WORK. For additional information regarding $COMMON, including differences between it and $WORK, please see our documentation here: https://hcc-docs.unl.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=30444241
For users who need a more robust storage solution, our Attic storage offering remains available and is the best solution for anyone needing backed-up archival storage.
Additional announcements will be made as details are finalized.
If you have any questions, concerns or need assistance with transitioning your data or workflows, please contact us at hcc-support@unl.edu